U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe infamously brought a snowball onto the Senate floor earlier this year to suggest climate change is a hoax. Perhaps a member of our own state’s delegation should return from their August break with a charred limb of a Ponderosa pine to prove that it isn’t.

Forest fires are raging across Central and Eastern Washington — so vast and intense that a haze hung over Vashon this weekend, a miasma of smoke that underscored how real climate disruption has become, even here, in the idyllic Northwest. Politicians will invariably argue that the Forest Service’s management practices are to blame or that it’s a fluke or that it doesn’t prove a thing.

But scientists, if we listen, will tell us something different.

What they’ll tell us is that we’ve entered a period of megafires — conflagrations of such staggering proportions that they are not only exhausting our resources and destroying homes but also transforming the vast forests of the West. They’ll tell us that the fires of the past decade have proven bigger, hotter and faster, burning down whole forests so thoroughly they might never grow back. They’ll tell us those fires trigger other ecosystem-altering effects, making way for invasive species, for instance, that forever change not only native forests but also the wildlife habitat they provide.

And they’ll tell us climate change is largely to blame.

National Geographic recently wrote about megafires, in an article datelined Twisp, Wash. It began with a sobering statistic: The Carlton Complex fire that tore across the Methow Valley last summer was the worst in state history — consuming a record-breaking 256,108 acres.

“What’s turning small fires into raging infernos,” the article notes, “is a stew of ingredients that includes government fire-fighting policies and the continued push by millions of people to set up housekeeping on the edge of national forests. But the main driver is climate change. Rising temperatures exacerbate drought, spread beetle infestations and melt the snowpack earlier. Early snowmelt alone has lengthened the fire season by 70 days since 1970.”

According to the article, the highly regarded National Research Council estimates that the amount of land burned in the West will quadruple for every degree Celsius that temperatures rise. Factor in another sobering statistic — that government models predict summer temperatures in the West will increase by 3.6 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century — and one begins to realize the magnitude of the threats to our Western forests.

That is, if we’re paying attention.

In the Puget Sound region, we’ve largely been spared some of the wild weather that has afflicted other parts of the world — fluke blizzards, fierce hurricanes and record floods. This weekend, however, something different happened in our blessedly mild corner of the planet. This weekend we smelled it. We saw it. We felt it. The moon was a beautiful but eerie orange crescent. The sun, when it rose in the east, looked like a red ball of fire.

Climate change is not so distant anymore.